About

Pen and ink illustration.

Published:

Tying in my love for the Victorian Era my ink and pen illustration is based on the ritual of a seances. During the era of Darwin, Freud, and Marx, the idea of mortality was very popular within Victorian culture. With this in mind, the religion of Spiritualism first appeared in the 1840s in upstate New York with the belief that spirits of the dead residing in the spirit world have the ability to communicate to the other side. By conducting sessions people sought out to contact spirits and communicate through a series of tapping noises and other forms of communication including the method of "table turning". This illustration focuses on this method of "table turning" in which the medium would ask questions with their fingers lightly placed on a table surface along with multiple participants to generate communication through the movement and elevation of the table.